Keyrock

^ I take it that's Baldur: Original Gate? Here are some Remnant 2 screenies: Action shots would be more exciting but I kind of have my hands full trying to not die during combat making pushing F12, shall we say, inconvenient. In the picture above, where the violet crystal is located, is the beginning of... Boss fight isn't really the right phrase... Let's call it a unique setpiece. I won't spoil anything, but it was a fun challenge. It took me a death to figure out what I'm supposed to do, then several more deaths to formulate a proper strategy, then a couple more deaths to successfully execute said strategy. Still less deaths than the Root Nexus boss fight. My mother****er Mudtooth (pay no attention to Reggie clipping his walking stick through the chair): Every time I go back to Ward 13 I have Mudtooth tell me another story. He hasn't repeated one yet.

Any anomalies causing disturbances in the space time continuum?

I got my second class in Remnant 2. I started as a Hunter and my second class is Handler; holy **** what a night and day difference the Handler's dog makes. Life is so much easier when you have a tank. I kind of wish I had figured out what to do to unlock my second class and invested in it earlier. I wonder if the early game would have been easier had I started a Handler, that dog tanking makes a big difference, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be doing nearly as much damage myself since I wouldn't have had the Hunter's ranged damage and weakspot damage boosts. Regardless, I have the dog to tank for me now and it helps so much. What I want to be doing is shooting enemies in the face, or whatever glowy bit is the obvious weakspot from far away. That's so much easier accomplished when my dog is pulling a good chunk of the aggro. i feel like I'm a fair bit of the way through Yaesha. I've killed 2 bosses so far, Mother Mind and the Root Nexus. Surviving the last wave (the Root Nexus doesn't attack you itself, it instead spawns adds) was rough, I lost count how many times I died before I finally felled that tree.

I'm playing Remnant 2. It's really ****ing good. It's also hard... Well, it's probably a combination of the game being challenging and me sucking at shooters. It's a testament to how well made and fun the game is that I'm still itching to continue playing even as I've died more times than I can count. A lot of my deaths come from getting overwhelmed. It's taken me a while to get used to how slow and cumbersome my character feels to move. That's not necessarily a negative, it's a deliberate design decision that just took me a while to come to grips with. I think what threw me off the most was the sprint. I don't know why it even exists. Sprinting is maybe 10% faster than my normal move speed. What's even the point? I kept trying to sprint to put distance between myself and groups of enemies, but it's just way too slow to be useful. It's a waste of stamina more than anything else. With that in mind, it's more important than in most games to proceed carefully and slowly to try to prevent getting surrounded. The good news is that the gunplay is fantastic. The guns sound and feel properly meaty, there's great feedback, stagger effects; it just feels really good to shoot guns in Remnant 2, which is important since that's what you're going to be doing the majority of the time. Also the game looks quite pretty. I believe this is one of the first UE5 games besides Fortnite. There are times that the game does look like a budget title, mainly in Ward 13, the hub town. Everything looks high res and sharp, but it feels like there are some effects missing in Ward 13, like some depth of field to soften far away objects and/or things on the periphery of vision. Conversely, the dungeons, at least the parts I've been in so far, look fantastic, right up there with the best AAA has to offer, with no shortage of volumetric fog, particle effects, ambient occlusion, etc.

I finished JA3. It's a dang good game and a fitting sequel to JA2. I'll play again on a month or two on commando difficulty.

Congrats! Here's to a healthy "puppy".

Ultimately, this comes down to manpower, something Russia has an abundance of and Ukraine doesn't. You can have all the weapons in the world, it doesn't matter if there's no one left to use said weapons. Realistically, the scenario that keeps getting touted as the only thing that Ukraine will accept where Ukraine takes back all the land they lost since the war special operation started AND Crimea is a fantasy. The only way that can happen is with NATO actually going to war (not just proxy war) and sending in fighting troops. That's a recipe for WW3. I don't know about you, but I DEFINITELY don't want WW3.

Pics or it didn't happen.

That sounds like the military version of BioWare Magic™. So the thought was, we have these raw recruits, we only have a few short weeks to train them, they're going to be hopelessly outnumbered, buuuuuuuut... Murican Magic™.

I guess I haven't reached "the twist" yet since I'm still steamrolling everything. I've been very slowly and methodically clearing out the map. With 3 diamond mines under my control (and I'm on the way to a 4th) and half a dozen or so diamond shipments intercepted I have so much money. I went ahead and hired 3 more mercs to fill out my main squad of 5 and secondary squad of 4 and make them both full squads of 6. I could have hired even more mercs but I don't particularly see the need right now. I do need to get to a sector where I can craft ammo, though, because I chew through 7.62WP like crazy with the RPK.

Masturbating in a movie theater will never be the same. On a serious note, I should rewatch Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Mushroom risotto.

I've had no difficulty issues, granted I'm a slow gamer so I probably haven't gotten to the challenging stuff yet. I'll probably play on Commando difficulty on a subsequent playthrough.

High Shoals Falls

I captured the Diamond Mine in A2. I got through the battle without taking a single point of damage by employing the defend a fortified position, use overwatch, and let my snipers (one with a Dragunov the other with a FAL) explode heads from a distance strategy. A wildly effective strategy. After that it only left

That's how I feel about Shadows of Doubt. I played the demo a while back and saw great potential in the game. It's 20% off right now but it's still in EA so I'll hold off for now.

Crab rangoon and sha cha chicken from my local chinese food restaurant. It's too hot to cook. This week started out hot and it's been getting steadily hotter. It's going to be worse tomorrow and Saturday. My AC is struggling to keep up running 24/7. No ****ing way I'm turning on the oven or stove top.

Do I get anything extra if I promise to tell a friend?

I think we all know how this ends. Russia takes the land bridge to Crimea, the Donbas becomes an "independent state" that's, for all intents and purposes, Russian. Both sides claim "victory" and we end up in a situation similar to Korea where technically they're still at war, although the hostilities have ceased. It's only a matter of how many more thousands of lives are lost before we reach the "conclusion" that we were always going to reach.

With the money the US has spent on the Ukraine War so far it could have instead purchased nearly 70 Mbappés.